The house at 12918 Weber Hill Road in Sunset Hills stands as a monument to everything that is wrong with flooding policy in ºüÀêÊÓƵ, in Missouri, in the nation.
Christmas lights still dangle from the gutters and windows. A Dumpster sits in the yard. Nobody lives there.
This is where Steve and Emilie Hayes used to live. They were by rising water last Dec. 30, when heavy rains rendered the banks of the Meramec River and many of its tributaries virtually helpless. The Hayeses’ house had flooded before, but never like this, with water rising nearly to its roof, overtopping two walls of sandbags set up to protect it from nearby Tributary B.
Since then, the Hayeses have lived with family members as they try to deal with insurance, city officials and state emergency management representatives.
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They received a flood insurance settlement, but it wasn’t enough to build a new house. They can’t live on Weber Hill anymore unless the property undergoes extensive and expensive flood protection measures. And the State Emergency Management Agency has refused to buy them out and condemn and bulldoze the property.
So there it sits.
“It’s almost like when someone passes away and they ate breakfast and the dishes are still on the table,†Emilie says. “Life just stopped.â€
This is what happens after the floodwater recedes.
It is what is happening in Baton Rouge, La., , after that city’s historic flood. Thousands of people have been pushed from their homes, and the process and expense of rebuilding will leave many of them out in the cold. Costs in Baton Rouge already are estimated to top $10 billion.
But there’s a problem. The is .
For states such as Louisiana — and Missouri — this is a predicament that in the era of climate change is only going to get worse. According to research compiled by the Pew Charitable Trust’s program, 33 federal disasters or emergencies have been declared in Missouri from 2000 to 2015 related to flooding or severe storms, with the federal government providing more than $870 million in aid.
The problem is exacerbated when communities don’t take flood preparation seriously, or, when they do, they don’t communicate with their neighbors about what they’ve done.
In December, for instance, Washington University geology professor Bob Criss suggested the flooding in ºüÀêÊÓƵ was hitting areas that hadn’t been affected by previous seasonal flooding because the old 100-year, and 500-year flood maps were obsolete. Criss has long argued that because of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers structures on the Missouri and the Mississippi Rivers, for instance, and other levees built in the region to promote development, floodwater can’t help but than previously.
Then, this spring, Criss discovered another problem. He began to suspect the Valley Park levee built to protect that ºüÀêÊÓƵ County city from frequent flooding of the Meramec was too high. by the Great Rivers Habitat Alliance found that it is.
The corps disputes the numbers in the study, a point Criss finds dripping with irony.
“So, according to the corps, the official base flood numbers are right when they want me to be wrong, but wrong when they want to build an oversized levee,†he said.
For people such as Criss, and the researchers at Pew, floods in the Midwest are going to become more and more disastrous — catching people such as the Hayes family in the rising water — until the region and the nation pay more attention to flood preparation and planning.
“We see a lot of building in places that shouldn’t be building,†says Phyllis Cuttino, Pew’s director for Flood Prepared Communities. Pew researchers hope that their work will help guide Congress as it rewrites the law that governs the National Flood Insurance Program. It must be re-authorized by September 2017 or it goes away.
Cuttino hopes Congress follows the spirit of an signed by President Barack Obama in 2015 which required that federally funded building projects must take flood risks into consideration and be built to a higher standard.
She also hopes the law reduces the millions of dollars paid out each year in flood insurance claims for buildings that are repetitive losses. The system, she says, needs better incentives for less construction in flood plains and areas with nearby levees.
In Sunset Hills, Steve and Emilie Hayes still don’t have a place to live nine months after the most recent local flood. Yet just a few miles away, the Maryland Heights City Council is considering handing out tax incentives to billionaire Stan Kroenke so he can build a retail playground in an area that was once the region’s most fertile farmland.
“Flooding is a shared responsibility,†Cuttino says.
It’s a lesson the ºüÀêÊÓƵ region has yet to learn.